blurted out in her letter to Maria Alexandrovna*, then I shall write about our mutual acquaintances. Yegor came by. I was terribly glad to see him, as I had no idea what to think about him. He looked lively and radiant. He chattered away incessantly. He told us that Vasily Vasilyevich has obtained a good position in Omsk, that Tonia has had a little girl and both are in good health, E. E. is delighted with her granddaughter (she was rather indifferent to the first one). Gleb has also obtained a good position, assistant station master near Tomsk. Zina is still sitting in Nizhne-Udinsk for now. So everything is going well with them. But poor M. A. is having a hard time in Riga. He wrote that life in the barracks is worse than penal servitude: they don't let anyone go anywhere alone, always under the escort of a soldier, and even then only to the shop. They've confiscated all his books except a German dictionary and a civil law code. The food is poor. It's impossible to have anything of one's own—everything is stolen instantly. They give such poor clothing that one has to provide one's own. But the worst thing is that M. A. has been placed precisely in the company that dealt with the workers—the soldiers received 10 rubles reward for killing a worker and, wherever they were on patrol, they fired on their own initiative. There. All the Minusinsk comrades are in good health. I recently received a letter from there and was very glad. In general, I never imagined I had grown so attached to all the Minusinskites.

Baramzin, to whom we left our dog, is preparing to present us (really Volodya) with its portrait—he draws very well. In general our dog is thriving and has become everyone's favorite. Speaking of the dog, I remembered Lirochka. Once she sent me some errands through me, and one of them contained the most detailed information about some mangy dog. A mutual acquaintance of ours recently received a letter from her and sent me excerpts from it. I didn't much care for the theoretical part of the letter. She says that theoretically Bernstein gives nothing. "It's sheer idiocy!", but, she says, the practical significance of his book is enormous—he drew attention to the needs of the masses, calls us to life, to concreteness. She explains the book's success by the fact that the orthodox tendency has become very tedious. Regarding the Resolution** she says that there energy finds an outlet in devising the path along which development ought to proceed.

* The letter has not been preserved. Ed.

** Apparently this refers to the "Protest of Russian Social-Democrats" (see Works, 5th ed., vol. 4, pp. 163-176). Ed.